1. Field:
The invention has to do with bait for attracting marine life, animals, and other wild living creatures to locations for capture, killing, or for performing a useful service, such as is done by bees or other insects in pollinating plant life. It also has to do with methods of storing smelly bait against loss of odor until used and of releasing the odor in small increments during use.
2. State of the Art:
Apart from the usual recreational catching of fish and other marine life, such as crustaceans, by individuals for sport, commercial fishermen, lobstermen, crabbers, crayfishers, etc. make extensive use of bait formulations containing attractants to draw the intended victims to traps therefor or to locations for netting or for other methods of capture or disposal. Such bait formulations typically take the form of edible matter, such as alfalfa or cottonseed meal, and a binder, such as wheat middlings, mixed with weighty inedible matter, such as sand, an attractant, such as fish oil, and water to form a dough, which is compressed into pellets or bricks and dried. When the so-compressed bait dissolves, as it does in the course of a few hours of being submerged in water during use, the attractant is dissipated so that the bait is no longer useful and requires replacing by fresh bait.
Such bait is not packaged for use, although for catching crustaceans it is often placed in net or other porous bags which will be engaged by the claws of the crustaceans seeking to devour the bait. Here, the bait is subject to rapid dissolution in much the same way it is when loosely placed in a trap.